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Text-to-speech alternatives for iPhone, by what you pay for
Five well-known apps read your books aloud on an iPhone, and the feature grids make them look interchangeable. They are not. Four of the five count something — money, characters or listening hours — and what they count tells you almost everything else about how they are built. This page sorts them by the meter.
iOS 18.2 or later · iPhone 12 or later & iPad · No account
In short
What are the best text-to-speech apps for iPhone, and which are actually free?
The iPhone readers worth comparing are Speechify, NaturalReader, Voice Dream Reader, ElevenReader, Apple's built-in Speak Screen and Sandbook, and what sorts them is the unit each one meters. Speechify and Voice Dream Reader charge a subscription, NaturalReader counts characters, ElevenReader counts listening hours. Sandbook meters nothing: free on iPhone and iPad, no account, no cap, 41 voices in six languages, iOS 18.2 on an iPhone 12 or later. It is also the narrowest: its real-time reading pauses when the screen locks, and it has no DOCX or iCloud sync.
Last verified 28 September 2026
Prices and limits checked on 14 September 2026, on the US storefront · How we compared
The question that sorts them
Every app here turns text into speech, and every one of them will show you a feature grid. Ask a narrower question first: what am I paying for, and in what unit?
Four of the five answer with a unit. Speechify and Voice Dream Reader charge money on a subscription. NaturalReader charges money and, on its free plan, counts characters — 20,000 a day on its Lite voices, 4,000 shared on the tiers above. ElevenReader charges money and counts listening hours: ten a month on the free plan, and reading at double speed spends them at double speed too. Apple's built-in Speak Screen is the exception, and it is the honest one: it costs nothing and counts nothing, because it is not a business, it is part of the operating system.
The unit exists for a good reason. When speech is generated on a company's servers, every sentence you listen to costs that company something at the moment you press play, so it has to be counted. When the model runs on your own device there is nothing to count. That is the whole of Sandbook's position — it is free with no cap because it has no server, not as a promotion — and it is why this page is organised around the meter instead of the feature grid.
What each app meters
| App | What you pay | What is metered | Where speech is generated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sandbookthe app this site is about | Nothing. No in-app purchase, no subscription, no paid tier, no trial to run out. | Nothing. No character limit, no minute limit, no daily quota — there is no server to bill you for. | On your iPhone or iPad, on the GPU through Apple MLX, every sentence. |
| Speechify | Free tier, or Premium at $29/month and $139/year on the vendor website. The US App Store listing shows several in-app purchases under the same names at different prices. | The free tier: 10 voices the vendor itself calls robotic, playback capped at 1.5× speed, text-to-speech features only. | Mostly on Speechify's servers. On-device iOS voices, running through Apple's Core ML, were added in December 2025. |
| NaturalReader | Free tier, or Lite at $13.90/month and $79/year on the vendor website. The iOS listing still sells that tier under its old name, Premium Plan, at $9.99/month. | Characters per day. 20,000 on Lite voices and 4,000 shared on Plus and Cloned voices; the device's own system voices are unlimited. | On NaturalReader's servers for the AI voices. The free Voices tier uses the pre-installed system voices on your device. |
| Voice Dream Reader | $4.99/month, or between $39.99 and $79.99 a year, on the US App Store. The listing states that a subscription is required to access the app, with a free trial for new users. | Nothing, once you subscribe — but there is no free tier to meter. Individual premium voices are sold separately at $4.99 each. | On the device: Apple's built-in system voices plus licensed Acapela, NeoSpeech and Ivona voice packs. |
| ElevenReader | Free tier, or Ultra at $11/month and $99/year on the vendor website. Top-up hour packs are sold at $5 and $10 on the US App Store. | Listening hours. The free tier gets 10 hours of text-to-audio a month, and playing faster spends the allowance faster. | On ElevenLabs' servers. Offline means downloading the finished audio in advance, on a paid plan. |
| Apple Speak Screen | Nothing. It is built into iOS — no app to install, no account, no purchase of any kind. | Nothing. | On the device, once the voice is downloaded. Enhanced Quality voices download over Wi-Fi and can be 100 MB or larger. |
The best offline text-to-speech apps for iPhone, ranked
The table above is not a ranking, and a page that never gives one is dodging the question people actually ask. So here is the order, with the app that publishes it labelled rather than quietly placed first. Speechify, NaturalReader, ElevenReader and Voice Dream Reader are absent from this particular list for a stated reason: the first three generate speech on a server, and the fourth requires a subscription to use the app at all.
Sandbook(the app this site is about)
Free with no in-app purchase and no cap: all 41 Kokoro-82M voices (28 in US and UK English, plus Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi) from first launch; EPUB, PDF, web pages and camera scans with word-by-word highlighting; no account. Real-time reading pauses when the screen locks (prepared chapters play locked), it has 6 voice languages, fewer than some multilingual readers, and no DOCX, iCloud sync or whole-book export.
Free with no In-App Purchases row on its listing, reading PDF, EPUB, DOCX, web pages and camera scans in 31 languages, and its own site says the audio is generated on your device. It never names the speech engine.
EPUB and PDF turned into audiobooks with word-level read-along, background playback and a sleep timer, on a choice of three on-device engines. Free covers three books and three voices; the rest is $4.99/month or $33.99/year.
Already on the phone, free, and on-device once an Enhanced Quality voice has downloaded — worth trying before installing anything. It reads what is on screen: no library, no EPUB or PDF importer, and no reading position kept per file.
Ranked on four things in this order: what it costs with nothing held back, whether speech is generated on the device with no connection, voice quality, and what the app does with a book once it is open. Only apps whose own pages establish both the price and the on-device synthesis are listed.
The five apps people compare Sandbook with
Each has a full page of its own, with the table, the concessions and the sources. The short version of each is below.
Speechify
The broadest product here: a web app, browser extensions and mobile apps sharing one synced library, with more than a thousand voices in sixty-plus languages, OCR scanning of printed pages, and a free tier the company itself describes as “10 robotic sounding voices” capped at 1.5× speed. Premium is $29/month or $139/year on speechify.com, and the App Store listing carries a longer set of in-app purchases at other prices under the same names. Since December 2025 the iOS app has also offered on-device voices running locally through Apple's Core ML, so calling it cloud-only is no longer accurate. Speechify alternative →
NaturalReader
A long-running platform — web app, Chrome extension, mobile apps — with 200+ AI voices in 90+ languages, OCR, and imports from Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive. It is the clearest case of character metering: the free plan gives unlimited listening on your device's own system voices, then 20,000 characters a day on Lite voices and 4,000 shared characters a day on Plus and Cloned voices, with no MP3 export and no OCR. Check the price on both shelves before you buy: the vendor's help centre sells the entry tier as Lite at $13.90/month, while the iOS listing still sells the same tier under its old name, Premium Plan, at $9.99/month. NaturalReader alternative →
Voice Dream Reader
The most capable reader on this list, and the one Sandbook is most often mistaken for. Every voice runs on the device, it plays with the screen locked, and it reads formats nothing else here touches — DAISY, Bookshare, MP3 and MP4 audiobooks — while iCloud Drive syncs the library, reading positions, bookmarks and annotations across your devices. It meters nothing, but only because there is no free tier to meter: the App Store listing states that a subscription is required to access the app, with a free trial for new users, at $4.99/month or between $39.99 and $79.99 a year. Voice Dream Reader alternative →
ElevenReader
ElevenLabs' reader app, and the only one here whose unit of account is time. The free plan is “10 hours of text-to-audio every month”, which the company reckons is about a 400-page book; Ultra is $11/month or $99/year, and the App Store sells top-up packs of 10 and 20 hours. Speech is generated on ElevenLabs' servers, an account is required, and offline means downloading finished audio in advance on a paid plan — capped at 20 hours a day and 150 hours a month under fair use. In exchange you get 1,000+ voices in 30+ languages. ElevenReader alternative →
Apple Speak Screen
Not an app at all: an accessibility setting already on your phone. Turn on Read & Speak, swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen, and iOS reads what is on it — in any app, with configurable highlighting, an adjustable rate, Speak on Touch to tap a passage, and Personal Voice if you have recorded one. It costs nothing, meters nothing, and synthesis runs on the device once an Enhanced Quality voice has downloaded. What it does not have is a library: no importer, no EPUB or PDF pagination, no reading position kept per file. It reads what an app has already drawn on the screen. Speak Screen alternative →
What Sandbook does instead
Sandbook is one app for iPhone and iPad with the entire speech engine inside it. Kokoro-82M — open weights, with all 41 voices, in a download of about 276 MB — ships in the app and runs on the GPU through Apple MLX, producing 24 kHz audio sentence by sentence as you listen, so playback starts after the first sentence rather than after the chapter. 41 voices, 28 of them US and UK English plus Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi, all available from first launch.
Open an EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF, Markdown or HTML file, add a web page, scan a printed page, or type or paste text. Each word is marked as it is spoken, any paragraph can be tapped to read from there, and each book opens where you stopped with its own voice and speed. PDF line wraps and hyphenated word breaks are repaired before speech, so a two-column paper reads as prose rather than as a list of lines. Playback runs from 0.5× to 2.5×. Your books never leave the device.
There is no meter because there is no server: no in-app purchase, no subscription, no character limit, no daily quota, and no trial to run out.
The trade-off is scope, and it is real: everything runs on the device, and a phone is a smaller place than a data centre.
- Real-time reading pauses when the screen locks. The model is holding real GPU memory. A chapter prepared ahead of time plays with the screen locked, but a whole book will not play on in your pocket. This is the biggest gap on the list.
- Six voice languages. US and UK English, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi, against thirty or more in some on-device readers and in the hosted ones.
- For iPhone and iPad, on iOS 18.2 with an iPhone 12 or later, or an iPad with an A14 or M1 chip or later. No Android, Windows or web version.
- No text recognition for image-only PDF files. Camera scans and photos are recognized on the device; a scanned PDF file is not.
- No DOCX, MOBI or AZW3, no iCloud sync, no voice cloning and no sleep timer.
- No whole-book audio export. Text in the Reader tab exports as M4A; books opened as EPUB or PDF cannot be exported as audio files.
What to check before you switch
Written as things to verify yourself, because the list above is one vendor's account of its competitors and you should treat it that way.
- Do you listen with the screen off? Settle that first. If you listen to whole books while walking, driving, or with the phone in a pocket, Sandbook is the wrong app and no other row in the table will change that. Its real-time reading pauses when the screen locks. Voice Dream Reader and NaturalReader both state background playback on their own pages; check the others yourself, because not every vendor documents it.
- Find the unit before you find the number. A free tier metered in characters a day, one metered in listening hours a month, and one metered by which voices you may use are not comparable quantities. Open the vendor's own limits page rather than a review site, and read what is being counted before you read how much of it you get.
- Check the price on both shelves. Web pricing and iOS in-app-purchase pricing are routinely different products at different prices under names the vendor has since changed — NaturalReader's entry tier is $13.90/month on its help centre and $9.99/month under its old name on the App Store. Quoting only the cheaper one understates what you will pay.
- Check what your own device qualifies for. Sandbook needs iOS 18.2 and an iPhone 12 or later precisely because the model runs locally; a hosted reader will run on much older hardware, and Speak Screen asks for nothing extra at all. If your iPhone is older than an iPhone 12, that decides it for you.
- Check that you still have the original files. No app here imports another's library, and positions, bookmarks and annotations do not travel. What travels is a DRM-free EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF, Markdown or HTML file in the Files app. Confirm you have those before you cancel anything.
The one thing no table settles is whether you like the voice. You can hear Sandbook's voices in your browser before installing, reading a sentence of your own.
Questions about choosing a reader
What is the best free text-to-speech app for iPhone?
It depends on whether the free tier is free or merely free to start. Your iPhone already has one built in — Speak Screen, under Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak — which costs nothing and counts nothing, but has no library and reads only what is already on screen. Among apps, Sandbook is free with no in-app purchase and no cap of any kind, because the speech model runs on the device; this site publishes it, so read that as the argument it is. Other on-device readers exist too; the ranked list on this page sets out what each one's free plan covers. Speechify, NaturalReader and ElevenReader all have free tiers, each metered in a different unit: voices and speed, characters a day, and listening hours a month respectively. Voice Dream Reader has no free tier; its App Store listing states that a subscription is required to use the app.
Why do text-to-speech apps limit characters or listening hours?
Because in most of them the speech is generated on the vendor's servers, so every sentence you listen to costs the vendor money at the moment you press play. A limit is how that cost is contained, and the unit tells you what is expensive: NaturalReader counts characters a day, ElevenReader counts listening hours a month, Speechify restricts which voices and what speed the free tier gets. An app that runs the model on your own device has nothing to count, which is why Sandbook has no quota to publish.
Is the Speak Screen feature built into the iPhone enough?
For a lot of reading, yes, and it is worth trying before installing anything. Speak Screen works in any app, costs nothing, highlights as it reads, and its voices run on the device. Where it stops is that it reads what an app has already drawn on screen: there is no library, no EPUB or PDF importer, no pagination and no reading position saved per file, so a 400-page book means keeping the book open and scrolling it yourself. A dedicated reader exists for that gap, not to replace the system feature.
Does on-device text to speech mean worse voices?
It used to, when on-device meant the old formant and concatenative system voices. It is a different question now that neural models small enough to run on a phone exist: Sandbook bundles Kokoro-82M, an open-weight 82-million-parameter model, and runs it on the iPhone's GPU at 24 kHz. What running locally does cost you is breadth rather than quality: 41 voices in six languages against the thousand-plus voices and thirty-plus languages a hosted service can offer, because a server can hold a library no phone would have room for.
Can I switch readers without losing my library?
Not by importing one app's library into another — none of these apps read each other's libraries, and reading positions, bookmarks and annotations do not travel. What does travel is the original files. Any DRM-free EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF, Markdown or HTML file sitting in the Files app opens in Sandbook, and a web page can be added from Safari or by pasting its link. If your library only exists inside a subscription service, keep that subscription running until you have checked that the files themselves are still yours.
How we compared
Every figure on this page comes from each app’s own public pages — the listing on the US App Store, the pricing page and the privacy policy — read on 14 September 2026. Prices, limits and features change without notice: where this page and the other app disagree, believe the other app.
Sandbook publishes this comparison, so read it as our argument rather than a neutral review. Everything in the Sandbook column is what the app does today, and you can check all of it in the app itself.
Sources
Vendor pages, read on the US storefront. The five apps compared above were checked on 14 September 2026 and the other on-device readers in the ranked list on 21 September 2026; each line says which. Where a vendor's own pages disagree with each other, both figures are given.
- Speechify — Pricing — Speechify · checked 14 September 2026
- Speechify – Text to Speech PDF — US App Store listing (v5.5.10) — Speechify · checked 14 September 2026
- Speechify — “Speechify Launches On-Device iOS AI Voices for Offline Reading” (18 December 2025) — Speechify · checked 14 September 2026
- NaturalReader Help Centre — Plans & Pricing (Personal Version), updated 13 August 2026 — NaturalReader · checked 14 September 2026
- NaturalReader Help Centre — Voices, Languages, and TTS Limits (Personal Version), updated 13 July 2026 — NaturalReader · checked 14 September 2026
- NaturalReader - Text To Speech — US App Store listing (v9.46) — NaturalReader · checked 14 September 2026
- Voice Dream - Natural Reader — US App Store listing (v5.5.8) — Voice Dream Reader · checked 14 September 2026
- Voice Dream Reader — Mac App Store listing (v2.0.2) — Voice Dream Reader · checked 14 September 2026
- ElevenReader — Pricing — ElevenReader · checked 14 September 2026
- ElevenReader: Read Books Aloud — US App Store listing (v1.11.32) — ElevenReader · checked 14 September 2026
- ElevenLabs Help Centre — How do offline downloads work? — ElevenReader · checked 14 September 2026
- Apple — iPhone User Guide: Hear iPhone speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback (iOS 26) — Apple Speak Screen · checked 14 September 2026
- Apple Support — Adjust voice and speed for VoiceOver and Speak Screen on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch — Apple Speak Screen · checked 14 September 2026
- Apple Support — Create a Personal Voice on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac — Apple Speak Screen · checked 14 September 2026
- Text to Speech - SayTXT Reader — US App Store listing (v2.4) — SayTXT · checked 21 September 2026
- SayTXT — saytxt.app — SayTXT · checked 21 September 2026
- Éist: PDF/Ebook to Audiobook — US App Store listing (v1.3.21) — Éist · checked 21 September 2026
The cheapest way to compare is to install one of them
Sandbook is free, has no account and no in-app purchase, and reads its first page within a minute of installing — in airplane mode, if you want to watch it work with the radios off. Keep whatever you are paying for until you have tried it.
iOS 18.2 or later · iPhone 12 or later & iPad